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Koda

Koda produce music of such exquisite beauty that it has brought us close to tears with each listen. It draws from a deep pool of emotion and touches on nearly every fibre of our being. You’d have to be made of stone not to have a similar emotional response.

Beauty though, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is a way of saying that beauty is relative, from that singular perspective. There is a weakness to this explanation though as it can be twisted, in the cynical minds of some, to the extent that everything is in its own way beautiful. Which would ultimately mean that nothing was beautiful. How could it be if everything was? Beauty would just be the norm.

But what happens when there starts to be a consensus? What if two people agree on something’s beauty? How about ten people? If this number climbs into the tens of thousands then is it correct to simply refer to it as beautiful? Can beauty be measured on some kind of scale? Should it? So many questions.

All of these questions started forming in our minds after we first heard Invitation to Love by Koda (The first tune on this page). This was the springboard that set us off on a Koda listening spree. A spree that we’re still on.

Koda are the musical alter ego to one Jordan Sudak, who shared his music with us on amazingtunes.com at the end of March. Based out of his bedroom in Columbia, South Carolina, he produces music that the internet has allowed him to share with the world. One of its more useful purposes.

Invitation to Love (as the description on the YouTube video rightly points out) sucks you right in with a hauntingly beautiful melody that is beguiling. The enchantment continues through the songs sentiment which is enhanced further by the use of the child’s bedtime prayer. It is in the comments about this track that the word beautiful kept popping up. We couldn’t agree more.

Then we heard Staying. This put Kodas music into another realm that we are struggling to find the appropriate words for. Which is a real problem for a blog.

There is something hypnotic to Staying that draws you in completely. Hitting repeat becomes your automatic and natural reaction to the songs ending. You need to hear it again, and again, and again, and…till you’ve heard it so often that you try to dissect it in order to understand why it has gained such power over you. This is where you need to apply some caution as there is only so much melancholy you should expose yourself to in such a short period. Anyway, the only person who could help you in this pursuit of knowledge would be Jordan himself, and we’re guessing that he won’t be sharing his secret with you anytime soon. That is unless it’s through another song.

One of Koda’s great strengths is the power to stir images in your mind through his music. This has been brilliantly captured by the video below.

and i as future kings
walk off the edge
hold me by my name
hold me til the end

Normally, we’d attempt to describe what this means to us. But in this case we feel that any description we attempt would in some, however little way, affect your response to it. This we feel would do the song a great injustice.

In order to try and answer some of our own questions we have come to this one simple conclusion. Koda’s music is beyond beautiful. We know this because it’s not just us who think this way. But everyone we know of who has come into contact with his music feels the same. We know that now, you do too.